How to Make Herself Agreeable to Everyone: A Memoir

When they introduce me at the UN, it feels more than polite, it feels fictious. The list of compliments. The clapping. I think other people need to believe that I can do good too.

I worry that when I do not explain exactly where my income and my voice come from, I am helping export the American myth, the one that promises opportunity while it promotes hierarchy.[8]

Both of them helped me consider that the response to something broken isn’t a big resolution, it’s in the sweeping, baking, planting, building, and caring for the world we need to live in every day.

I wonder if the reason why I’ve been saying I’m going to be president all these years is because I want to be treated like someone who might be president one day.

And the ability to disassociate is also what made me successful: Without my own emotion getting in the way, the audience could find room for their own response.

It’s just a job. It’s just sitting, waiting, zoning out, and being a piece of a machine, and sometimes I’m too tired and it’s too big and I’m just one piston.

James Baldwin quote: “The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.”[5]

Scientists say suppressing the expression of an emotion can reduce the feeling itself.[23] In a study published in The Journal of Pain, subjects who were told not to frown experienced less pain than those who grimaced when heat was applied to their arm. However: “People who tend to do this regularly might start to see the world in a more negative l

“The process of making art,” writes Rebecca Solnit, “is the process of becoming a person with agency, with independent thought, a producer of meaning rather than a consumer of meanings that may be at odds with your soul, your destiny, your humanity.”[2]